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Work Sessions with Duncan Marquiss – Kabelvåg, 2019

8 July 2019

LUX Scotland is delighted to announce that we will be accompanying artist Duncan Marquissto Nordland kunst- og filmskole in September 2019 to take part in On & For Production and Distribution Work Sessions in support of the development of Marquiss’ new piece Interviewing an Animal in its Own Language.

The Work Sessions provide a platform for artists to share projects in development with a small group of invited professionals in order to receive conceptual and strategic feedback and to connect with prospective co-producers. The sessions are conceived as an adaptation from cinema industry models in response to the specific demands of the contemporary art context.

‘This is a proposal for a film exploring lateral connections between Artificial Intelligence and Ethology (the science of animal behaviour). It is a film about instincts, artefacts, and studying non-human minds. The Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907-1988) studied animals using artificial stimuli that mimicked natural signals. He painted herring gull beaks on sticks, courted grayling butterflies with cardboard mates, and watched oystercatchers incubate giant plaster eggs… Are we predisposed to identify with things that appear intelligent, and does misrecognising AI make us vulnerable to manipulation?… The film will be a feature-length experimental documentary, exploring Tinbergen’s ideas and observing AI engineers at work… I hope that recontextualising AI in relation to ethology will help to frame this much-discussed topic through an alternative lens.’

Duncan Marquiss (b. Scotland 1979) is an artist based in Glasgow who works with drawing and the moving image. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Stalking The Image: Margaret Tait & Her Legacy, GoMA, Glasgow, 2019; We Would Be Lost Without You, Experimenta, BFI London Film Festival, BFI Southbank, 2018; Antiphon, LUX Scotland at Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2017; a solo exhibition Copying Errors, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 2016. Marquiss was the 2015-16 recipient of the Margaret Tait Award.